What's Driving Woke Capitalism Insanity?

The backlash boycotts against Disney, Bud Light and now Target have been massive and effective. While Bud Light attempted to rectify their misaligned marketing campaign, Target has taken the ideology to extreme levels in promoting trans conversions for 'children'. The Target marketing strategy was NOT in the adult section of the store - it was pushing an agenda on children's clothing. These are Public Companies with fiduciary responsibilities and duties to their shareholders - that could result in lawsuits for gross mismanagement.

In 2023, Disney has lost 6.4 million subscribers as a direct result of their internal policies. Since March 2021 when the boycott began the share price of Disney has tanked from $197 per share to just $88. Target's share price has dropped a full 13% since the boycott began just ten days ago translating to a $10 billion loss. Unlike Bud Light, Target doubled down; adding satanic clothing for children.

The bottom line of marketing strategy is to increase sales thru an understanding of who your market audience is. Less than half of 1% of people in the US identify as trans... Today the media push is to create the impression that the trans community is representative of 10%-20% of the US population...

Target executives and the Board apparently don't care - and that is concerningly odd...

Who is really driving the Corporate Wokeness?

The answer is the Hedge Funds: BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street who are among the largest investors of all major corporations. They make the rules, initiate the Credit Scoring system that all corporations must abide by or have their business literally destroyed. These Funds force the incorporation of ESG. In the case of BlackRock, Larry Fink is the progenitor of all things Liberal Agenda compliance...

Video of BlackRock CEO Larry Fink speaking at Deal Book 2017 resurfaced over the weekend and may help explain why woke runs amok in the year 2023.

In the clip, the discussion is on more diversity at the top of corporations in America and Fink stressed that this is an investment criteria for the world's largest asset manager - keep in mind that 19 Attorneys General singled out BlackRock in 2022 for their Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) activism, as noted by Independent Women's Forum.

In effect, the CEO said the desired behavior of placing diversity ahead of competence must be "forced" on companies...

ESG scores represent a clever woke scoring system that assigns a social credit score on diversity and inclusion - the Corporate Equality Index, which is overseen by the pro-LGBTQ+ advocacy group Human Rights Campaign, is considered " an ominous cog in ESG's wheel," according to the New York Post...

Watch video of BlackRock CEO Larry Fink.

... Corporations like Disney, Anheuser-Busch and Target are plunging in profits and losing billions in market cap after pledging fealty to the trans agenda. In particular, the public is setting out to make examples of institutions that support trans indoctrination of children. Simply put, a line in the sand has been crossed...

... average Americans are finally engaging in a culture war which was started years ago, not so much by the political left, but by globalist institutions using leftist activists as enforcers and saboteurs...

... major lenders such as Blackrock or Carlyle Group, or think-tanks like the Ford Foundation, seek to control societal outcomes using lending as leverage... The higher your ESG score, the more likely it is that you will qualify for access to debt. This is part of the reason why a large array of corporations are increasingly jumping on the "pride month" bandwagon...

Twenty years ago, the name of the game in the business world was "brand building."... Now, corporations are actually willing to destroy the very brands they spent so much time and money developing all in the name of political idolatry.

It seems like pure madness, but what if they know something we don't? What if they are riding out an engineered economic crisis so that they can be rewarded later with "too woke to fail" riches? My theory is that while ESG lending appears to be dying today, tomorrow ESG lending will be the only way any company will be able to survive...

... Proxy advisory firms are hired by big money managers to provide guidance on various corporate-governance issues and shareholder votes. That makes the advisory firms very powerful since most Americans invest through mutual funds and other managed accounts.

And it's no secret that the progressive-left agenda has gained support from these outfits in recent years. With that, trillions of dollars in shareholder votes from ­places like Larry Fink's BlackRock and Vanguard are now openly supporting left-wing causes....

The average retail investors in mutual funds have no say or vote in this vast transformation even as their money is being used for political purposes...

... Wokeness - generally defined as awareness and activism for leftist positions on "justice" regarding race, sex, gender, abortion and the environment - has become a must-have accessory for many CEOs...

"Can you believe that it has gotten so bad that a bank could inform you that you can no longer have your account in their institution because you are too conservative..."

In many of the Fortune 500 boardrooms and at large banks and investment houses, many corporate leaders are - at the very least - willing to go along in order to avoid being called out by the likes of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the Sierra Club, Black Lives Matter or the Southern Poverty Law Center...

... But as American polarization increases, it becomes clear that wokeness is also a social, economic, legal, and political phenomenon; it cannot simply be reduced to the ideas inside people's heads....

The core thesis of James Burnham's 1941 The Managerial Revolution helps explain what is happening in the West today. A former Trotskyite who later became a leading figure in postwar American conservatism, Burnham argued in that book that Western society would not see the collapse of capitalism and its replacement by socialism. Instead, he maintained, America would likely see capitalism replaced by a nonsocialist successor - one dominated not by capitalists in the classical sense but by a class of managers that would come to control the real economy, regardless of formal ownership status...

But if Burnham were alive today, he might see wokeness as exactly that: a systematized, managerial ideology capable of standing on its own as a claim to rulership over society on behalf of the new class of managers...

The main practical demand that wokeness places on society is a massive expansion of managerial intermediation in previously independent social and economic processes....

In 2015 Ross Douthat coined the term "woke capitalism" when writing a piece for the New York Times. He defined it as how companies signal their support for progressive causes in order to maintain their influence in society...

Andy Olivastro: If you're a shareholder of a corporation, you literally own the company and it's your property in the form of capital. That capital is now being diverted to causes and purposes that you never intended to support, but it's all because of this Great Reset that there are people that believe so much about how things should be done, that they're using your money to advance their own initiatives...